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The dynamics of a sports organization involve three main forces: the team, the game, and the fan. In essence, the team is the passion that gets the fan fired up, the game is where it all happens, and the fan keeps it alive. Of the three dynamics, the one the sports organizations can control the most is the fan experience.

The team and the game have many variables: Injuries can bench a quarterback or an unlucky miss of a three-pointer with two seconds left in the game could cost a team the championship. But the fan experience is the area sports organizations can shape the most by providing the right products and services the fans want at the right time and in the right format.

Unforced errors are costly when it comes to fan engagement, and this is where design thinking can make a big difference in developing innovative products and services in order to drive growth and profitability without disruption. As Tim Brown, CEO of the Palo Alto-based design and innovation firm IDEO, puts it in a Forbes.com interview, “Design thinking is all about upgrading within constraints.”

As I wrote in my previous posts in this series, sports organizations face some of the same challenges as their counterparts in more conventional industries, such as retail or consumer products. Because they operate in similar terrains, sports organizations are not immune to the challenges of market demands that force them to compete with alternative sources of entertainment options.

Thus, they must effectively manage their scarce resources to deliver value to their customers (fans) and other stakeholders. In this context, fan engagement takes center stage, because it can not only create new opportunity to drive growth but also improve current business operations, leading to both increased productivity and unparalleled fan value.

According to Frank Wheeler, Global VP of Business Development for SAP Sports, fans want, at minimum, three things: to be connected, to feel engaged, and to feel recognized. How can sports organizations go about not just fulfilling these needs but also exceeding these expectations?

Selling food that tastes good is, of course, a prerequisite to providing fast, convenient, and high-quality service. But we do not stop there. We may look into different options for delivering these services. We may consider enhancing the menu or increasing the distribution outlets to improve speed of delivery.

Sports organizations employ talented individuals who specialize in their area of expertise. Their domain knowledge and their insight from decades of firsthand experience allow them to execute what they do best.

For example, coaches inspire their teams and identify scouting opportunities. Back-office personnel develop and manage internal processes to ensure a smooth operation whether the game is played at home or away. Marketing teams design campaigns and build partnerships to build a strong brand name. IT organizations ensure that all systems and technology work as expected, whether it is the digital scoreboard at the stadium or the handheld scanning device at the gate, not to mention the team’s website, the backbone of its social media presence.

On the other hand, when it comes to unique technology solutions to enhance fan engagement and advanced analytics capabilities as part of an integrated business intelligence framework to drive insight for faster, better-informed decisions, they may lack either the know-how or the resources to get started. If we think about this challenge for a moment, we recognize that this is not expected of them, in that their domain knowledge is what brought them to this organization in the first place. And this is where design thinking comes into play and can make a big difference: It changes the equation to drive innovation that would otherwise be difficult, if not impossible.

Design thinking, if applied effectively, can help sports organizations embark on a journey to improve products and services for their fans. It all starts with the right partnership with an outside organization that can not only provide guidance for developing blueprints to address current business challenges but also develop technology and products that can offer end-to-end solutions. Giving priority to pressing business needs ensures proper alignment with the business strategy. Focusing on the customer (fan) makes it the focal point of this journey. Bringing multidisciplinary teams together at the table to leverage the power of collective expertise results in products, technology, and business processes that may be unique only to that sports organization.

Finally, and most important, embracing ambiguity allows human ingenuity to flourish so we can chase opportunities for new ideas we would miss or not seek otherwise.

In analytics and technology in general, this means we would promote the design thinking philosophy of “Fail early and often” in order to harness the power of rapid prototypes by delivering “proof of plays” to limit the risk and accelerate collective learning. In analytics, this could translate into views, user interfaces, and data analyses that may consider each data source as a strategic asset and each data point an opportunity for deeper customer (fan) insight.

For example, we start not with the design of a dashboard for analytics, but with the pressing business question that needs answers right now. We begin asking a lot of questions, starting with the basic ones. We assume no answers and consider no paths to follow yet, but we acknowledge what we do not know and what we need to understand while keeping an open mind and maintaining our curiosity so it can thrive like a child’s innocent mind would do.

Each data source becomes a potential data field to be mined and a probable feed to the analytical engine. No question is left unasked, and each discussion brings a unique point of view fueled by the diversity inherent as much in multidisciplinary teams’ collective knowledge as it is in their individual members’ backgrounds. The process of continuous and rapid cycles speeds up the development process. The final artifact is a genuine product of human ingenuity and the basis for a strong analytics foundation.

By embracing the values of design thinking, we can create opportunities not just for innovative technology solutions but also for analytical capabilities that can be consumed on mobile BI platforms in real time and delivered on the premises or in the cloud. These opportunities can transform how sports organizations run their operations and continue to deliver value-added products and services, improving the overall fan experience.